Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Friday, April 27, 2012

Are we supposed to believe Jonah Goldberg wrote this column? A sample:

If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it’s that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens “legible.”

I borrow that word from James C. Scott, whose book Seeing Like a State left a lasting impression on me. Scott studied why the state has always seen “people who move around” to be the enemy. Around the world, according to Scott, states have historically seen nomadic peoples, herdsmen, slash-and-burn hill people, Gypsies, hunter-gatherers, vagrants, and runaway slaves and serfs as problems to be solved. States have tried to make these people stay in one place.

But as Scott examined “sedentarization” (making mobile people settle down), he realized this practice was simply part of a more fundamental drive of the state: to make the whole population legible to the state. The premodern state was “blind” to its subjects. But the modern state was determined first to see them, and then organize them. This is why so many rulers pushed for the universal usage of last names starting around 1600 (aristocrats had been using family or clan names for centuries already). The same goes with the push for more accurate addresses, the standardization of weights and measures, and of course the use of censuses and surveys. It’s much easier to collect taxes, conscript soldiers, fight crime, and put down rebellions if you know who people are and where they live.

And:

And this brings me to our current debate over Arizona’s immigration laws. Opponents like to conjure the police-state association of “Ihre papiere, bitte.” I think that’s wildly exaggerated (and so do several Supreme Court justices, apparently). But as someone who’s against a national ID card, I’m sympathetic to the concern nonetheless. The Constitution lists three federal crimes — treason, piracy, and counterfeiting — but today we have more than 4,500 federal crimes, all because the government in Washington wants to make the American people more legible. I don’t want to make that easier with a national ID card.

But what I wish liberal opponents would understand is that in a society where the government “gives” so much to its citizens, it’s inevitable that the state will pursue ways to more clearly demarcate the lines between the citizen and the non-citizen.
Most (but by no means all) conservatives I know would have few problems with large-scale immigration if we didn’t have a welfare state that bequeaths so many benefits on citizens and non-citizens alike. I myself am a huge fan of legal immigration. But if you try to see things like a state for a second, it’s simply unsustainable to have a libertarian immigration policy and a liberal welfare state. Ultimately, if you don’t want cops asking for your papers, you need to get rid of one or the other.

There’s a kind of argument-that-isn’t-an-argument that vexes me. I first started
to notice it on university campuses. I’ve spoken to a lot of college audiences.
Often, I will encounter an earnest student, much more serious looking than
the typical hippie with open-toed shoes and a closed mind. During the Q&A
session after my speech he will say something like “Mr. Goldberg, I may disagree
with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say
it.”

Then he will sit down, and the audience will applaud. Faculty
will nod proudly at this wiser-than-his-years hatchling under their
wings. What a glorious moment for everybody. Blessed are the bridge
builders.

My response? Who gives a rat’s ass?

It's very strange that one is informative, somewhat moderate, and civil while the other is pure Pantloadian. Perhaps he was just trying to raise his tone for National Review On-Line's discerning, intellectually sophisticated readership.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

I thought for a time that the spirit of 1990s Harvard--the spirit of the overstuffed resume, of privilege without sacrifice, of ambition without ideals--might have been dealt a mortal wound, and that my generation's future would be sterner and brighter, like steel in winter's light. My classmates and I had always been successful, at least as our world defined success, but it seemed fleetingly that we might be offered a chance to be great.

Disillusionment came rapidly enough. It seeped in first with the realization, gained as graduation gave way to the beginning of real life, that we Harvardians would not be going to war. There was no call from Washington, no draft, not even an appeal for volunteers; we were told to resume our normal lives, not asked to take up arms. And so we did. In spite of the long nights spent researching the CIA and the chatter about the draft, there was no rush to join the military or the intelligence services, or even the government.... There simply weren't enough cadets to fill a Harvard brigade, both before September 11 and after.

A few of my friends did volunteer.... For the rest of us, though, joining the military or the CIA or the foreign service involved risking too much--not only our lives but our private ambitions, our dreams of fame or wealth or power. Throughout our youth, we had been encouraged to look out for ourselves, to compete ferociously for the prizes and honors and scores that marked success in the meritocratic world. We had been bred into a striving selfishness, and after such an education, I wonder if even a presidential call to arms would have convinced us to subordinate our own ends to those of the platoon or the embassy, Langley or Paris Island....

Douthat spent his life waiting for greatness to be thrust upon him but was far too selfish to do anything to achieve that greatness. Douthat is a peculiar mixture of self-delusion and self-awareness; he knew that his position was due to money, that all his fellow students were not the best and brightest, that many of them were little more than well-born social climbers. But he decried the overstuffed resume while overstuffing his own resume, he lamented others' lack of sacrifice while refusing to sacrifice anything himself, he bitterly criticized his classmates' lack of ideals while never living up to any of his own. Douthat will always expect others to do what he will not, hoping that somehow the world will thrust greatness onto him without actually requiring him to do anything to achieve it.

Others must suffer and die to make Ross Douthat great; others must live up to his ideals while he enjoys his civilized, self-indulgent life. Poor men must die for Ross' patriotism, women must sacrifice and suffer so Ross can weep for the holy fetus, families must sink into poverty so Ross can smugly lecture on conservative economic principles.

Ross Douthat is rich and powerful and elite. And one day, God willing, Ross Douthat will have climbed over enough bodies and economic destruction to become Great.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Of all the lies that pollute our daily lives in America, the lies that tell us we are exceptional, that we are moral, that we are a benevolent force for good in the world, one of the most common is that we live in a meritocracy. We are told that our leaders are our betters because they inherited intelligence and drive from their successful parents and were trained and educated to be hard-working, knowledgeable, and successful leaders from birth. Because followers get their self-esteem from belonging to a group they must believe, despite any and all proof to the contrary, that their group's leaders are smart, capable and good. Any attempt to dissuade them from this belief is futile; followers must convince themselves that the leader is no longer a member of the group before they will accept any criticism of the leader.

Remember that about 67% of the population is authoritarian to varying degrees. Most people, no matter what their religion or party may be, are authoritarian and will make excuses for almost any wrongdoing as long as it is their side doing the wrong. Most people will stay in a group that rapes, steals, and tortures because they know they will be expelled from the group, or be forced to expel themselves because they no longer willing to deny the truth. It is either lies and obedience or truth and isolation. One third of the population is willing to live with isolation, insecurity and doubt. The other two thirds are not and do not want to be harassed by a bunch of anti-social, untrustworthy tribal rejects.

And speaking of anti-social, untrustworthy tribal rejects, let's discuss the great conservative thinker Ross Douthat. Resist the instinct to glance away at the sight of Mr. Douthat in The New York Times and take a closer look as Harvard fusions a great big ball of gas and dirt into a conservative star. By reading Privilege: Harvard And The Education Of The Ruling Class, we can plainly see how blind worship of authority and one misfit's desire to fit in with the rich and powerful created the wise and witty pundit we know as Chunky Ross Douthat.

Like most newly minted Harvardians, I envisioned college as a magical place, a paradise where the difficulties of my teenage years would be sloughed off and quickly forgotten.

Douthat's parents, whom he claims "had the whole meritocratic pedigree" of Standford and Yale, dropped out and becoming hippies in Berkeley. They hoped to become writers but evidently that did not pan out.

But my mother was chronically ill with strange and inexplicable allergies by the time I was born, and my father--who had drifted through law school before meeting her--took the Connecticut bar and began to practice law, which he continues to do, successfully and unhappily, to the present day.

Douthat grew up in the ultra-respectable world of wealthy professionals but did not feel one of them.

[My] reality was somewhat different, as my mother's ailments, impervious to conventional medicine, drove us to seek unorthodox cures. We drifted through various diets--first vegetarianism, then the super-vegan philosophy known as macrobiotics--and alternative medicines, such as homeopathy and acupuncture. My sister was a home birth, delivered by two lesbian midwives and breast-fed until she was two, and neither of us was given the usual round of vaccinations, since my mother was convinced--rightly, I tend to think--that their side effects were worse than the faint risk of whooping cough. In the summers we went to health-food camps in Vermont, where I gagged y way through endless meals of brown rice and seaweed. We were religious wanderers, too , in the strange and esoteric world of American Pentecostalism, before we finally came to rest, late in my adolescence, in the arms of the Roman Catholic Church.

His parents refused to send him to "snobby" Choate, thereby sentencing young Douthat to a lifetime as a social second-rater.

[... I] settled in at Hamden Hall, excelled academically, and cultivated a resentful disdain for my more popular classmates. I was skinny and scholarly, with a concave chest, a romantic streak, and an awful sense of social inferiority. Everyone else seemed to be more athletic, more attractive, and more sexually active than I as, or could ever hope to be.

Douthat convinced himself that the Connecticut prep schools of the rich were bastions of liberal oppressiveness. He was, he said, a wonkish kid who rebelled against "the environment of reflexive liberalism that swaddles an overclass childhood," not a social misfit with embarrassing family life and ex-hippie parents. He and others like him "immersed themselves in right-wing ideology much as other, similarly geekish teenagers might lose themselves in computer programming, or alternate rock, or Dungeons & Dragons. This sort of Republican is likely to be a zealous proselytizer, interested less in winning elections than winning converts..."

Douthat did what Douthats always do, carve out a niche for himself on the school newspaper and start up an anonymous underground paper that made fun of jocks. The jocks had their revenge but:

[T]he occasional prank was a small price to pay for our sense of superiority, our smug assurance that we were on our way to somewhere higher and better, somewhere populated exclusively with people like us.

...

Once I reached Harvard, I told myself, I would never again have to endure the sneers of the high school jockocracy, the dismissive glances of the in crowd.... At Harvard I would be happy At Harvard I would be cool.

If it weren't for those hippie parents/snobby elite/fools too ignorant to appreciate my wisdom I would be cool!!--the eternal lament of the libertarian, the hipster, the wingnut welfare recipient, the wanna-be. But Douthat isn't cool--that is, he doesn't feel at ease with himself so he can't feel at ease with others. He doesn't know what he wants or likes, he just wants what others seem to have that he does not. He doesn't happily live his life on his own terms, he worries obsessively that he is excluded from a privileged life lived on others' terms. His family and tribe fail him so Douthat eventually moves on to being the little tinpot dictator of the tribe of Douthat, with the Roman Catholic Church taking the place of prep school and Harvard by providing him with rules to live by and superiors to suck up to.

Douthat quickly "discovers" that Harvard exists to raise up the rich's young to even higher levels of achievement and social success. Douthat's self-professed naive wonder does not mesh with what we have heard of prep school life; the striving and climbing start early and never let up, out of habit if not necessity. From the beginning he is obsessed with fitting in with the upper crust of the upper crust and spends the next four frustrating years watching richer, better connected men and women succeed where he cannot. Also from the beginning, Douthat has nothing but scorn for the liberal elite of Harvard. They think they are so diverse when they really are all rich! Their social climbing is sickening, and they wouldn't accept him to the Porcellian club! Those liberal girls were just giving it away, but not to him!

Women are almost always "girls" to Douthat, and his first bit of fame at Harvard comes from trashing a female student who steals from a club's treasury.

I was a columnist for the Crimson by that time, and it would be nice to say that I put aside my personal feelings for [the student] and took the high road. But her arrest delighted me--it offered a delicious story, seemingly vindicating the moral order of the universe--and I decided to get personal.

The girl in question had always slighted Douthat, ignoring him in favor of more important people, so Douthat took his revenge. Douthat often takes his revenge; nearly every description of every person in the book is negative. His few positive words are reserved for conservatives and benefactors such as Harvey Mansfield, William F. Buckley and James Fallows. Douthat doesn't think much of Harvard's curriculum as well; it does not have a set of core classes and he felt it was full of liberal academics who were all assuredly socialists and postmodernists, with the only exception being the economics department.

To tilt right is, in some sense, to assert a belief in absolute truth, and the only absolute truth that the upper class accepts these days is the truth of the market.

Douthat never got his absolute truth at Harvard, and was immensely disappointed afterwards that the school never made him feel like a well-educated gentleman in the best conservative tradition.

Naturally Douthat's many disappointments extended to the fairer sex, who had the messy and unengaging habit of sleeping with whomever they chose, frightening the hell out of him. He had been raised by an eccentric mother who evidently was obsessed, perhaps out of necessity, over what went in and on her body and the bodies of her family. Douthat thinks of himself as a great romantic and laments that none of the girls at Harvard wanted to be courted in the best tradition of Medieval Europe--chastely and at a distance, where they could not get any of their nasty women fluids on him. Thus the famous chunky Reese Witherspoon event, in which Douthat is repulsed by a pretty young woman's advances. He pursues girls who are dating other men and, serially, falls for the "not now" dating phenomenon, in which the girl strings him along.

[O]ur love had to be pure, untainted, perfect. And it would be. I just had to be patient.

Very, very patient. Which Douthat was willing to do, as his was a pure soul that would wait for True Love. While he was waiting, however, he decided that sex just didn't live up to its previous billing; that the media promised him transcendence and bliss and all he got was a rock.

When my classmates and I came to college, there was plenty of sex to go around--but it never quite lived up to its advance billing. We were promised a utopia, a landscape of erotic plenty, a place where, as in Huxley's Brave New World, everyone belongs to everyone else.Instead, we had to deal with confused relationships, mixed signals, hang-ups and violence and jealousy and misery--with all the unpleasant stuff of human desire, which sexual rebels long traced to the pernicious effects of repression and patriarchy and old-time religion, but which had endured despite the slow demise of these boogymen.

Bullshit. Nobody promises anybody paradise, or an exception from pain and distress. As always, Douthat has to set up a strawman to explain why he is eternally disappointed in the rest of the world, which never seems to live up to the fantasies that sustained young Douthat for lo those many years of alienated adolescence. The women themselves are beside the point; they only exist to give Douthat a club that he can finally belong to.

Douthat showed only a small amount of interest in classes, but greatly enjoyed getting drunk and rhapsodizing with his friends over philosophy, ethics, and politics, while sneering at liberal activists that actually put their theory to practice. Promised greatness all their lives, these Douthats are perpetually disappointed when all their privilege isn't enough to make them great.They look back to an earlier era, wistfully telling themselves that they would have been great heroes if it weren't for this modern, decadent era that was holding them back. Douthat was happy to get a job with a national magazine his last summer at Harvard but it was at National Review, which did absolutely nothing for his social life. The only bright spot was a couple of invitations from Buckley, who was canny enough to invite lowly employees working for peanuts to visit his world of yachts, penthouses and summer cottages.

It wasn't until 9/11 that Douthat felt called to greatness, and that feeling was temporary. For a brief, glorious time, liberals were silenced and everyone was a conservative. Douthat was in his element despite his fear, but alas, the terrorism attacks stopped and the feelings of unity and moral clarity faded away. At one point Douthat coyly hints that he finally found a girlfriend but as his time at Harvard draws to a close, Douthat imagines more opportunities for greatness ahead, opportunities that are more than fulfilled as Douthat bleats his little conservative sermons from his pulpit at The New York Times.

If you can't join 'em, force them to submit to your whims, with the full faith and force of the Catholic Church at your back. That'll teach those dirty liberal hippies.

Monday, April 23, 2012

My goodness, it's been ten days since anyone posted on Megan McArdle's blog. No wonder she hunted down a few more guest bloggers. Coincidentally, both are very concerned with women and economics. Or maybe that is not such a coincidence after all; McArdle is a female and does discuss the economy. But McArdle is libertarian/conservative, so when she wants to discuss the role of women in life and economics she turns to a pornographer and an economist who thinks women aren't smart enough to be economists.

"Tony Comstock" is a pseudonymous erotic filmmaker turned charter boat captain. His films were an innovative, possibly unique genre: filming actual couples, who talked about their relationships as well as, well, you know. His boat captaincy is just as innovative; he's put together his own, rather unique design for a boat, and built it himself. He's a longtime correspondent of this blog, and a former guest-blogger for my colleague, Jim Fallows.

Garett Jones is an economist at George Mason University. He's a macroeconomist whose work includes the study of business cycles, and also, the study of why IQ matters more for nations than for individuals. He's also worked on Capitol Hill.

Comstock popped up occasionally at Reason due to his anti-censorship efforts, which is no doubt why McArdle knows of him. McArdle's commenters have been complaining of the site's dullness; this ought to liven the place up.

Jones has written about IQ and economics. When conservatives want to write about IQ there is usually only one reason why; they want to explain to us in scientific terms why preserving the present power structure is absolutely necessary or the economy will collapse. For most of us it already has, but just because conservative policies have already inflicted grave harm doesn't mean a little fear-mongering or propagandizing can't be used sell more conservative policies. Let's let Mr. Jones speak for himself via the abstract for his paper What Is the Right Number of Women? Hints and Puzzles from Cognitive Ability Research.

This paper comments on the lead symposium article, “Reaching the Top?—On Gender Balance in the Economics Profession,” by Christina Jonung and Ann-Charlotte Ståhlberg. Using evidence from brain scans, mental ability tests, personality tests, and DNA, I show that the representation of women in the economics profession may be largely driven by persistent differences between the sexes in the interests and abilities that make good economists. The easiest way to raise the number of women in economics may be to change economics itself so that it focuses on the actually-existing strengths of women in areas such as verbal fluidity, conscientiousness, and computation.

[Jones] commits what he calls the "Summers heresy" and suggests that there are important gender differences. On mathematical/spatial reasoning, men have a higher mean and, more important, a higher variance. So the upper tail of that distribution is predominantly male. Meanwhile, on conscientiousness, women have a higher mean.

He suggested that in recent years, economics has become less extremely mathematical. In addition, some of the new empirical techniques may reward conscientiousness more than extreme math. Thus, women are playing a larger role.

I was born at the wrong time. I attended graduate school near the peak of ultramasculine economics (my term). The math was almost too much for me (in fact, five years later it would have been too much for me). I have always doubted the value of the theorem-proving approach to economics. I note that these days many people are sharing my doubts about the mathematical macro that emerged during what Paul Krugman calls the "Dark Age." However, unlike Krugman, I do not think that we can simply go back to old Keynesianism. I think that there were many problems with Keynesianism circa 1970 that were not solved by coming up with mathematical solutions for the Lucas critique. The Leamer "con" of econometrics problem and the "unit root" problem are what caused me to "lose my religion" regarding macroeconometric models. See my lost history paper.

Also, I spent a lot of time in graduate school thinking about the deeper issues of monetary theory and unemployment. The result is that I have always harbored doubts about the fundamental Keynesian story. Hence my interest in the alternative that I call PSST.

In any event, Ultramasculine macroeconomics is not the answer. Maybe some of who are less able to do extreme math may nonetheless have better theories.

It's not that he was fundamentally wrong, it's just that he's too much of a deep thinker.

In short, it is no wonder why Jones associates with famously innumerate McArdle, the only wonder is why McArdle handed her blog over to someone who doesn't think women have the mental capacity to think as well as men. We know that McArdle extrapolates from personal experience but it is not true that having girly parts lowers your IQ.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Joe Biden is vice president in no small part to his Scranton altar-boy cred.

Lopez abetted the Catholic Church's attempt to get away with sex crimes against altar boys. She does not get to say "altar boy" ever again. To paraphrase Albert Brooks:

Please do me a favor. Don’t use the word. You may not use that word. It is off-limits to you. Only those who did not rape altar boys may use it. And don’t use any part of it either. Don’t use “altar.” Don’t use “boys.” You’re in a church, you can point - the priest is standing behind a marble table. And … and … you are girls or things.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Old people are "supported by the state." Widows and babies are "supported by the state." Soldiers are "supported by the state." All the things our society is supposed to consider right and proper, moral and good, are "supported by the state." We should be happy to help our old people live with dignity, to feed hungry babies, to care for mothers and children, to support those who do our dangerous, unpleasant work so we can live easier lives.

Instead we are plagued by people who devalue anything that does not give them personal pleasure. Their money, their house, their job, their convenience, their ego, their pleasure. That is all there is and all there ever was.

Evidently Roseanne Barr is running for president, and she (or whoever) has written a bulls eye of a article on the mommy wars. It is succinct, direct, and disdainful, just as it should be. A few of its greatest hits:

The media, which are completely clueless about every single issue that affects American women, must have had a shiver run down their nonexistent spine when they realized they could dig out the old “stay-at-home mom versus working mom” script that worked so well to divide and conquer mothers and women along class lines to help defeat the Equal Rights Amendment back in my 20s.

...

The picture of Ann Romney “manning” the phone banks in front of a campaign poster that reads “Mitt Romney is good for business” tells me all I need to know about her contributions to her family, her church, and her country—convincing other privileged white women that defeating feminism is necessary to save the confederacy of dunces called the GOP, which steals bread from the mouths of widows and orphans and workers’ retirement funds as it congratulates itself for dismantling all that social-safety-net, entitlement, nanny-state load of socialist insurrection and places that money instead into private hands, so that the filthy working sluts can’t get any of it for their selfish selves. They will just use it to pay for abortions and other fun things if given half a chance.

...

But why bring out this fake issue again now? Could it be to divert the conversation from the continued restrictions being placed on women’s reproductive rights and make us forget that both parties are socialists for their own causes whose joint policies of redistribution of wealth have made it nearly impossible for anyone to “choose” the stay-home option and not feel that the system is rigged against 99.9 percent of the population, no matter how hard they work?

Supporting the .01 percent is immoral but Republicans advocate immoral policies all the time, in vague and pious terms that evade the effects of their actions. Unfortunately followers don't feel ashamed for doing what the authority wants, they are ashamed when they don't do what the authority wants. To break the bond between the two you have to destroy the follower's belief in the authority. This is fairly easy to do with libertarians because conservatives already consider them suspect for publicly rejecting the right way, the conservative way. But conservatives will not turn on their leaders until the majority rejects their leaders. Followers must follow.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Coincidentally, two great conservatives thinkers have recently gifted us with two great books that explain in great detail and with great care how they are right and everyone else is greatly wrong.

In his weekly column, nicely gauged to support his latest book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (or, Why Everyone Should Be Just Like Me), Ross Douthat tells us that the problem with society today is that everyone is too individualistic. Oh sure, you may think authoritarianism is bad, Douthat says, but that's just because you haven't met the right sort of authoritarianism. Being controlled by the state is bad but being controlled by the Church--the One True Church, of course--is the way to cure all the ills of the world.

The question hanging over the future of American social life, then, is whether all the possibilities of virtual community — the connections forged by Facebook and Twitter; the back alleys of the Internet where fans of “A Dance to the Music of Time” or “Ren & Stimpy” can find one another; the hum of virtual conversation that’s available any hour of the day — can make up for the weakening of flesh-and-blood ties and the decline of traditional communal institutions.

...

In his classic 1953 work, “The Quest for Community,” the sociologist Robert Nisbet argued that in eras of intense individualism and weak communal ties, the human need for belonging tends to empower central governments as never before. An atomized, rootless population is more likely to embrace authoritarian ideologies, and more likely to seek the protection of an omnicompetent state.

The kind of totalitarianism, fascist and Marxist, that shadowed Nisbet’s writing isn’t likely to come back. But a kinder, gentler kind of authoritarianism — what the blogger James Poulos has dubbed “the pink police state,” which is officially tolerant while scrutinizing your every move — remains a live possibility.

So the best way to keep our nation out of the hands of authoritarians who seek to control our every move is to become religious authoritarians. As Douthat previously explained:

Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum all identify as Christians, but their theological traditions and personal experiences of faith diverge more starkly than any group of presidential contenders in recent memory. These divergences reflect America as it actually is: We’re neither traditionally Christian nor straightforwardly secular. Instead, we’re a nation of heretics in which most people still associate themselves with Christianity but revise its doctrines as they see fit, and nobody can agree on even the most basic definitions of what Christian faith should mean.

This diversity is not necessarily a strength. The old Christian establishment — which by the 1950s encompassed Kennedy’s Roman Catholic Church as well as the major Protestant denominations — could be exclusivist, snobbish and intolerant. But the existence of a Christian center also helped bind a vast and teeming nation together. It was the hierarchy, discipline and institutional continuity of mainline Protestantism and later Catholicism that built hospitals and schools, orphanages and universities, and assimilated generations of immigrants. At the same time, the kind of “mere Christianity” (in C. S. Lewis’s phrase) that the major denominations shared frequently provided a kind of invisible mortar for our culture and a framework for our great debates.

Today, that religious common ground has all but disappeared.

Hierarchies look a lot better when you are at the top. When discipline and social order are being maintained at your own expense, they do not look quite as wonderful.

Conservatism's other boy genius, Jonah Goldberg, has also written a book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, lamenting the lack of rigid ideology in society. It seems that the problem with people today is that they don't agree with conservatives, who are always right. Take Jonah Goldberg, for example. People disagree with him, even reject him, and that, my friends, is just wrong.

We’ll, I got the word that “The Daily Show” has taken a pass on having me on to talk Tyranny of Cliches. The explanation that was passed on to me was that the book is too “one-sided” and that they don’t do books like that. As far as I can tell, that’s nonsense.

Of course, the show is free to have on whoever they want. I was just a little surprised. My last outing on the Daily Show was rather famous. Stewart went after me hammer and tongs for nearly 20 minutes and then they cut it down to five or six minutes, in ways — I’ve been told (I’ve never watched it) — that were quite friendly to Stewart (Here’s Mark Hemingway’s response at the time). I was hardly great, and I certainly should have prepared myself for such a hostile interview so early in the book tour.

Yes,, John Stewart is so notoriously hard-hitting and in-your-face, as the kids say.

But Stewart was a mess. He seemed to think that spending an afternoon reading up on fascism made him an expert.

Says the man who used to ask his readers to read and summerize his research material for him.

I have never watched the final clip that aired, but in the interview he seemed obsessed — as many critics of LF have been — with some quotes from Mussolini denouncing “liberalism.” The argument goes something like this: See! Liberal Fascism makes no sense since Mussolini hated liberalism.

The problem is that the liberalism Mussolini was denouncing was the “Manchester liberalism” of free markets and free trade, which pretty much bolstered my point. For the record, while I have huge problems with many of Stewart’s views and arguments, and have written as much many times, I still think he’s very talented and a charming guy.

Do you know the saying, "if he had a brain he'd be dangerous"? Goldberg disproves that cliche. From The Doctrine Of Fascism by Benito Mussolini:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity (11). It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts.

The rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual (12). And if liberty is to he the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State (13). The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State - a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values - interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people (14).

No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State (15). Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State (16).

The stubborn stupidity so evident during Goldberg's interview with Stewart is fully in evidence in his new book as well. From the book's introduction:

There’s a kind of argument-that-isn’t-an-argument that vexes me. I first started to notice it on university campuses. I’ve spoken to a lot of college audiences. Often, I will encounter an
earnest student, much more serious looking than the typical hippie with
open-toed shoes and a closed mind. During the Q&A session after my speech he will say something like “Mr. Goldberg, I may disagree with
what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Then he will sit down, and the audience will applaud. Faculty will
nod proudly at this wiser-than-his-years hatchling under their wings.
What a glorious moment for everybody. Blessed are the bridge builders.

My response? Who gives a rat’s ass?

First of all, my right to speak never was in doubt. Indeed, I’m usually
paid to speak. Besides, I’ve given my speech already and we’re in Q&A
time: Shouldn’t you have told me this beforehand? Second, the kid is almost
surely lying. He’ll take a bullet for me? Really?

Clichés like these are a way to earn bravery on the cheap, defending
principles you haven’t thought through or perhaps only vaguely support.
Or, heck, maybe he really would leap on a grenade so I could finish talking
about how stupid high-speed rail is. But it still doesn’t matter, because
mouthing these sorts of clichés is a way to avoid arguments, not make them.

...

I started to notice that the same thing happens in writing, on TV, in books; people invoke these clichés as placeholders for arguments not won, ideas not fully understood. At the same time, the same sorts of people cavalierly denounce far more thought-out positions because they’re too “ideological.” Indeed, in America, we train people to be skeptical of ideology. College students in particular are quick to object with a certain gotcha tone: “That sounds like an ideological statement.”

Such skepticism doesn’t bother me. Indeed, I encourage it. The problem
is that while our radar is great at spotting in-bound ideological statements, clichés sail right through. People will say “It is better that ten men go free than one innocent man go to jail” and then stop talking, as if they’ve made an argument simply by saying that. They will take the slippery slope at face value. They’ll say “Diversity is strength,” as if it means something, and “Violence never solved anything,” as if that were not only plausible but so true that no further explication is required.

“We are only as free as the least free among us” they’ll proclaim,
misquoting Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elie Wiesel, or was it Captain
Jean-Luc Picard? But of course, this isn’t even remotely true. It is a very
nice thing to say. It’s a noble thing to try to live by. But it’s in no meaningful sense true. Rather, it is the sort of thing people assert in the hopes that it will win them uncontested ground in an argument.

Sometimes the problem is simply lazy thinking. But in other cases the
lazy thinking merely creates the vulnerability for radical thinking. Some
incredibly ideological ideas simply ride into your head like the dream
spelunkers in the movie Inception—setting up, working their way through
your programming—all because they’re wrapped in the protective coating
of clichés.

Stupid Jonah Goldberg says that everyone else thinks they are so smart when they really aren't, and from this arrogance and stupidity flow all the world's ills.

What offends [Jonathan] Cohn and his fellow progressives is the suggestion that any liberal victory once pocketed
can ever be reversed. Laws and words have no binding power on
future generations, but once Team Progressive puts points on the scoreboard,
they can never come off . That is what is sacred, because their conception
of history only goes in one direction.
This is the living, breathing heart of the progressive worldview. It is
as ideological as any conviction can be. And that is fi ne. There is nothing
wrong and a great deal that is right with having ideological convictions.
What is off ensive to logic, culturally pernicious, and, yes, infuriating
to me is the claim that it is not an ideological tenet. Progressives lie to
themselves and the world about this fact. They hide their ideological
agenda within Trojan Horse clichés and smug assertions that they are
simply pragmatists, fact fi nders, and empiricists who are clearheaded
slaves to “what works.”

...

Industrial planners like competitiveness because they like industrial planning. They like spending money on dams and roads and windmills because there’s a photo op at the ribbon cutting. They like to believe they are smarter and wiser than the free market economy, and if only we could put the
m in charge, they could impose a more rational, planned economic system.

...

Before then, in the 1960s it was the Whiz Kids who held
that modern economics was too complicated to leave to voters and consumers.
They inherited the argument from the New Dealers, who pushed
for an “economic dictatorship” in the words of Stuart Chase. They, in
turn, were standing on the shoulders of the progressive technocrats, who
took their cues from the Soviet Union (and Woodrow Wilson), who insisted,
in the words of Walter Lippmann, that we must abandon the “drift”
of nineteenth-century laissez capitalism and adopt the “mastery” of economic
planners. You can keep going, but the story is the same: arrogant
intellectuals trying to win czarlike power over the economy with fake
arguments that sound reasonable.

So that is what this book is about. It is about the clichés that have a tyrannical hold on our minds and the phrases that serve to advance ideological agendas that would expand and enhance the State’s mastery over
our lives. By no means are all expansions of the State tyrannical, but for
all intents and purposes, all advances of tyranny are statist. These are the
themes and convictions that inform the coming chapters. They informed
my decision to include some clichés while ignoring others. The first few
chapters are an attempt to flesh out this fundamental point, by coming to
the defense of ideology properly understood.

I do not claim that the conservative mind isn’t bound by clichés from
time to time, or that my collection exhausts the subjects covered, never
mind those not covered. But I would and do argue that conservatives are
more honest about their indebtedness to ideology. We declare our principles
and make our arguments more openly.

Naturally Goldberg has a cliched picture of a dirty hippy on the cover of his book, thereby proving that liberals rely on lazy cliches while conservatives are thoughtful and have well-developed arguments. Just as the smiley face with a Hitler moustaches on the cover of Liberal Fascism proved that liberals were the ones calling people fascist for no reason.

And so , dear readers, we discover that the problem with the world today is not blind obedience or bad arguments, it is rejection of Ross Douthat's blind obedience and Jonah Goldberg's bad arguments. If we would only do whatever they say, how happy and successful the world would be. For as we can plainly see, religious institutions do not exploit their followers for power and nothing could be more successful than conservative economic theory.

Friday, April 13, 2012

The burdens of the rich are many. Most of us, who are lucky enough to be poor or middle class, have it easy. When we need to travel we have a panoply of choices to pick from--we can walk, take public transportation, drive our car, carpool, or take a cab. But the wealthy and nearly-wealthy are much less fortunate. They have none of those options; walking is too time-consuming and physically onerous, and public transportation is sometimes crowded and one never knows who one will be forced to look at or stand next to--they might be nothing like one! The upper class has cars, of course, but traffic is often heavy and what is the use of money if one is still forced to mingle with the lesser folk? Carpooling is out of the question; it's inconvenient and there's a nasty aura of cheapness about it. Taxis are gratifyingly out of reach of the poor but again, one is forced to suffer through the indignity of trying to hail a cab with the more common folk and sometimes not getting one right away. Take it away, Megan McArdle!

Where I live in Washington, D.C., about a mile and a half north of the Capitol, you can sometimes get a taxi in two minutes flat. And sometimes, after spending 20 minutes wistfully waving two fingers in the air while the traffic hurtles past, you have to give up and trudge to the train.

There’s no way to tell which will happen until it happens—and so, I rarely bother to try hailing a cab. Neither do my neighbors. And the paucity of potential fares in my part of town—a relatively low-income, low-density neighborhood—also makes it harder to get cabs back home from other neighborhoods. Technically, it’s illegal for D.C. cabdrivers to refuse a fare within the District, but then, technically, it’s also illegal to drive above the speed limit, jaywalk, or falsely claim to have been awarded the Medal of Honor. On a typical Saturday night in the District, as far as I can tell, all of these laws are mostly honored in the breach.

Like most urbanites, I’ve spent a lot of time voicing the standard complaints: Why are taxis dirty and uncomfortable and never there when you need them? Why is it that half the time, they don’t show up for those 6 a.m. airport runs? How come they all seem to disappear when you most need them—on New Year’s Eve, or during a rainy rush hour? Why must cabbies drive like PCP addicts? Women complain about scary drivers. Black men complain about drivers who won’t stop to pick them up.

What's a Ubermensch to do when she needs elite transportation but can't afford either a car and driver or expensive limo service?

...

What I’m describing is a classic market failure: people who are willing to do business together can’t make it happen. If taxis and passengers only knew how to find each other, and could strike deals that would appeal to both, everyone would be better off. Why can’t we fix this?

Fortunately we have our very own guide to the wild, wide world of the nearly-elite to help us navigate this tricky dilemma. Ms. McArdle takes time away from twittering and working on her magnum opus, The Freedom To Suck Worse Than Anyone Has Ever Sucked Before, to explain that the best way to be Uber is to use Uber.

As it turns out, a small but rapidly growing business is trying. One Friday night in December, my husband and I drove over to Adams Morgan for some karaoke with friends. “You drove?” a friend who lives near us asked incredulously. “I just used Uber.”

McArdle is incredibly lucky in both her friends and casual acquaintances; whenever she writes a column she just happens to have discussed her subject matter with various friends or business associates, and those people invariably act like actors in a commercial, beholding her ignorance with incredulity or sad regret. Some people might be annoyed at being addressed with condescension and one-upmanship, but fortunately McArdle is not one of those (no doubt friendless) people.

Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber, told me that he and his partner “wanted to be able to push a button and get a ride.”

I read someplace that reporters are taught to say the Important Person being interviewed "told me" instead of "said" to make the reporter seem more important. Not that McArdle would need to be told, I hasten to add.

That’s a fair enough description of the service that they launched in San Francisco in 2010, and that is now available in nine major cities—including New York, Boston, and Paris—with plans for expansion to at least 25 more. Set up an account, plug in your credit-card number, and in less than five minutes Uber’s smartphone app will be showing you a map of your location, the nearest available cars, and how soon one can get to you. Click the screen a couple of times, and a sleek black sedan is on its way.

Unlike traditional limo services, which rent you a car and driver by the hour, and usually on no less than an hour’s notice, Uber charges time-and-mileage fares, just like taxis, and the cars it finds for you typically show up within 15 minutes of your request. That convenience and style is costly; in D.C., the price is usually at least 50 percent more than that of an equivalent cab ride. Uber’s critics frequently imply—perhaps with a grain of truth—that it’s a service for the affluent that takes fares from hardworking taxi drivers who are struggling to make rent. “Uber’s real defenders,” a D.C. blogger has written acidly, “comprise a mix of socialites, transportation fanatics, and libertarians.”

Hendel wrote an informative, fair and amusing post on Uber, which no doubt is why McArdle did not link on it. Who needs the competition?

And yet, this analysis misses something important. Yes, Uber has created a higher-priced, higher-class service for people who can afford it—but it has also broadened the market to people who formerly couldn’t get cabs at all. For my husband and me, the appeal of Uber is simple: it’s there. A car that will actually show up to take me to the airport, or to my home, is worth considerably more than a cheaper, but unreliable, alternative.

As you dig deeper into Uber’s story, you find out that it’s about more than plush car service wherever and whenever you want—or even the innovative technology that powers it. Perhaps most of all, Uber’s story is about the ins and outs of regulation—and about why cab service is so unsatisfactory nearly everywhere in America.

Of course it is. Some might say that it's about following the laws that all other taxis or limos must follow, but some people are just knee-jerk meanies who hate businesses. And you will not be surprised to hear that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, once again, has raised his horrific corpse from the grave to strangle innovation through his evil servant, the New Deal.

Almost all the everyday complaints about cabs trace back to this regulatory cocktail. Drivers won’t take you to the outer reaches of your metropolitan area? The regulated fares won’t let them charge you more to recover the cost of dead-heading back without a return customer. Cabs are poorly maintained? Blame restricted competition, and the inability to charge for better quality. Cabbies drive like maniacs? With high fixed costs for cars and gas, and no way to increase their earnings except by finding another fare, is it any wonder that they try to get from place to place as fast as possible?

The problem with this analysis is that evidently it is easy to become a taxi driver in DC, which, with the nature of the city itself as a capitol with a dense and wealthy working population, has created the highest taxi-to-population ratio in the nation.

Some of the most common taxis in the city include Ford Crown Victorias, Ford Tauruses, some Mercurys, and even some Lincoln Town Car models. Most of the District's 6,500 to 7,000 cab drivers own their own vehicles; in fact, the District is the only region in the country where the majority of cabs are independently owned and operated.[26]

D.C. now has more cabs per capita than any other city in America. If all of D.C.'s cabs were owned by one company, the firm would be the city's largest private employer. The open-entry system allows anybody who can pass the hackers' test and pass vehicle inspection to go into business as a cabbie. The industry also serves as a remarkably efficient example of what is known as para-transit, a form of moving people about that's more public than a car, but less so than, say, a bus.

Fortunately Uber has no such restrictions, as it is occupying a gray, non-regulated area presently, in which it does not follow either taxicab or limo rules. It can charge whatever it wants, at least for now. Regulation problem solved!

On New Year’s Eve, Uber implemented its “dynamic pricing”—read: inflated fares to account for extra demand—without really explaining how it worked ahead of time. Suddenly, the tweeps and Facebookers previously enamored of the upstart were hurling tomatoes; one Rockville resident reported a charge of $185 to get home from Chef Geoff’s near Ward Circle (a comparable cab ride usually runs $25). Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told the website All Things D that the firm was refunding some of the fares, but didn’t plan to change the business model. “If you look at a club that charges a $20 cover on a normal night and then charges $100 on New Year’s Eve—that’s just what happens,” he said.

Not long after that, Uber found itself in a fight with the D.C. Taxicab Commission. The company, the commission alleged, had failed to follow the relevant regulations for what it is—a car service—and was instead operating as a sort of taxi/limousine hybrid. Officials arrested a driver in a sting by the Mayflower Hotel, charging him with two violations of the rules. That misstep, though, Uber managed to spin in its favor. After all, its customer base doesn’t appreciate regulations that interfere with their attempts to ditch D.C. cabs. Uber launched a social media campaign around the hashtag #UberLoveDC, which garnered them far more publicity than simply following the rules would have. Even the New Year’s dustup helped them, in a way.

For Megan McArdle, this is a good thing.

The data and the ability to set fares are what let the company patch the holes in the current system. A car is always available (because at peak times, such as New Year’s Eve, the company raises prices until supply matches demand). The car is well maintained. And as long as you’re willing to pay the fare, that car will take you wherever you want to go, without regard to race, ethnicity, or ZIP code.

Hey, nobody said freedom was free! No doubt McArdle will be thrilled to be the happy recipient of Uber's mercurial pricing system. She is very supportive of innovation in business.

But don't forget this is Megan McArdle we're talking about, keen investigative reporter and scourge of the common man, wherever he may raise his common, and no doubt unwashed, head.

But just because Uber is good for its passengers and drivers doesn’t mean that it’s good for everyone. Taxi drivers are a powerful political constituency in many cities. And as Robert McNamara noted drily, “Like any other business, taxi drivers think it would be great if no one could compete with them.” In some cities, including San Francisco and Washington, D.C., a regulatory backlash has hit the company hard.

In early February, I drove out to Anacostia, to one of those grim municipal buildings whose very exteriors suggest footsore queues and the smell of industrial-strength disinfectant. This is the home of D.C.’s Taxicab Commission.

I entered a little warily; two reporters were arrested last June for attempting to record a commission meeting.

I wanted to see what would happen if I applied for a license to drive a limousine in the District of Columbia. D.C.’s limo and taxi regulations seem to require that a license be issued to anyone who can meet fairly minimal standards: “The Office shall issue a license to each applicant who has complied with the requirements of this chapter,” says Section 1209.1 of the District’s municipal regulations. However, since 2008, the commission has apparently been ignoring this straightforward language.

The offices, located on the second floor, have a narrow entrance blocked by a security guard at his desk; you cannot see the bureaucrats unless he lets you past. “What do you want?” he asked me, not unkindly.

“I want to get a license to drive a limo,” I told him.

“There’s a moratorium,” he said, and pointed to a memo posted on the wall.

I’d like to tell you exactly what the memo said, but the commission wasn’t giving out copies—“We had some, but we ran out,” said the security guard, and no wonder, given that the “temporary” moratorium has been going on for years. The gist was that there would be no new limo licenses until the commission decided to hand them out.

“Take a picture with your phone,” suggested a nice driver who was waiting for an appointment in front of the desk.

“No pictures!” said the guard.

“Why not?,” I asked. He shrugged. I gazed wistfully at the counter beyond, but decided against trying to charge through. After a moment, like numberless aspiring cab and limo drivers before me, I left empty-handed. The D.C. Council is considering a bill that could essentially make the moratorium permanent: entry into the city’s limo market might then be nearly impossible.

Sniff! James O'Keefe would be so proud. McArdle also attended a meeting in support of Uber.

The real threat to the company is the promulgation of new regulations that would make business expansion impossible by cutting off the supply of licensed limos, and other regulations designed to shut down Uber entirely—that is, just the sort of measures being proposed in D.C. Uber’s executives are well aware of these obstacles. Regulation, Kalanick told me, is “an issue we have to deal with in every city.” So far, they’ve been surprisingly skillful at fighting back.

Shortly after Chairman Linton’s sting, for instance, Uber began rallying its fans on Twitter, using the hashtag #UberDCLove. In late January, I attended an event the company set up at a sleek downtown club, which was crammed to the gills with Uber’s neatly dressed fans, chatting animatedly while they enjoyed free pizza and drinks.

Kalanick, a short man with spiky black hair and a genial smile tattooed on his face, somehow got the entire crowd to watch an Uber PowerPoint presentation, which he narrated double-time, dropping the company’s apparent motto—“A convenient, classy ride” roughly every 30 seconds.

Somehow? Surely McArdle is aware that "free" food and drink create a sense of obligation in the potential customer, and is a commonly used marketing technique.

The result was, incredibly, the nation’s first populist limo movement. Whenever Kalanick mentioned Ron Linton’s name, the crowd booed—one particularly enthusiastic fan kept shouting “Fuck that guy!” Kalanick’s smile never wavered. He finished by telling the crowd: “I need you guys. So, one, stay on Facebook, stay on Twitter. Two, hearings—go to hearings. Go to political events.” For the first time in 20 minutes, he paused. “The bigger we get, the harder it is to take us out.” The crowd roared.

As I made my way toward the door, I bumped into Robert McNamara, the attorney fighting against many taxi regulations, who was there as an interested observer. “I’m impressed by how professional this is,” he told me.

I must have raised an eyebrow, for he hastened to explain: “When you have an issue like this, the first thing you do is, you have a town hall. You find an excuse to get people in a room, and then you make them angry.” For the moment, Uber’s angry fans seem to be carrying the day. Though the D.C. Taxicab Commission has not recanted its position on Uber, it also hasn’t made any further moves against the company.

That may change, of course. But every customer Uber gains in D.C. (and even out of it) makes the company harder to attack. Uber set out to change the taxi market. In enlisting scattered consumers against well-entrenched interest groups, it may end up doing something more revolutionary.

And no doubt when McArdle is surprised by unexpectedly large charges from Uber it will be the fault of regulation as well.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Conservatives are up in arms regarding Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's statement that housewife Ann Romney never worked a day in her life. Dana Loesch said:

Rosen apparently subscribes to the Linda Hirschman worldview, one that posits women are only as valuable as their contributions outside the home, unrelated to children and family. Rearing up the next generation that will someday run the world is woefully under appreciated.

From an overflow of the heart the mouth speaks and Rosen makes it clear that her prejudice against women who stay home stems from a lack of respect and appreciation for what those women do. If the goal of feminism is choice, Rosen betrays the mutual respect amongst members of the female sex by degrading the choices of other women.

At National Review (your home for racists for over 50 years!), Katrina Trinko quoted Ann Romney's response.

“She should have come to my house when those five boys were causing so much trouble,” Romney chuckled. “It wasn’t easy.”

“My career choice was to be a mother,” she added. “We need to respect choices that women make. Other women make other choices to have a career and raise a family, which I think Hilary Rosen has actually done herself. I respect that. That’s wonderful.” She also gave a shout-out to “dads at home raising kids.”

Romney indicated she had no intention of backing down on speaking for women.

“I want to tell you what women are telling me,” she said. “And Hilary needs to know this, because I’ve been on the campaign trail for one year. And guess what women are talking about, and I don’t care if they’re stay at home moms or they’re working mothers or they’re grandmothers . . . they’re talking about jobs, and they’re talking about the legacy of debt that we’re leaving our children.”

Raising your eyebrows at stay-at-home mothers of many children may be the sexual revolution’s most acceptable bias.

It is extremely gratifying to hear all this praise for women who choose to stay home with their children, as I did. Maybe conservatives aren't as bad as I thought. They think that women should stay home to do the hard work of caring for their children, and it is very hard work. I work from 6:30 am to approximately 8:00 pm and often have great difficulty finding two or three free hours a day to work on this blog. Conservatives are very, very concerned that without supervision and constant attention, children will not grow up to be good citizens. Religious conservatives, especially, think that mothers should be home with their many, many children, as they think that all women are driven by innate urges to procreate and nurture.

Well, maybe not all women. If you are African-American, suddenly staying home with your children is a bad thing. In a nation that has an incarceration rate of 39.4%* (and a population rate of 13.6%), and an unemployment/population ratio of 53.2% for African-American men, African-American women are told to get married and be supported by their husbands if they want to be mothers. Obviously staying home with your children is fine if you are white but if you are not, staying home with your children is a sign of laziness and immorality.

*In comments, Downpuppy points out that the incarceration rate for black males is 4.3; the New York Times says 1 in 9 black males are incarcerated. More data:

¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

I posted this comment on a thread at Naked Capitalism; I reproduce it here because I am short of free time and because it is connected to my earlier posts on racism and "freedom of religion."

[S]peaking generally; although some individuals might change their opinions most will not because not all devout people are motivated by the desire to follow Christ’s (or some other deity’s) commands to help other people.

The purpose of organized religion seems to be to teach obedience, not goodness. Because deities do not interact with our physical world, all clergy must persuade others that they are and/or were in communication with their god(s). Without authority it is difficult to persuade others that you are right and they are wrong, that they have the right to command and you must obey. Therefore one of the essential features of organized religion is teaching the followers to give up their own autonomy and give the power over their minds and lives to their leaders, who know and obey God’s laws. Religions define the godly as those who obey God’s laws and the wicked as those who disobey God.
Therefore the godly are motivated to please and obey God, not necessarily do good, which in this case means helping the poor and hungry. Of course many religions (and Jesus specifically) command their followers to help the poor but those who do not want to help others for personal and/or political reasons can easily convince themselves that they are disobeying God or his words by helping others, thereby excusing themselves from their own laws.

Well certainly the Bible says we are to care about the poor. There’s over 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor. And God says that those who care about the poor, God will care about them and God will bless them. But there’s a fundamental question on the meaning of “fairness.” Does fairness mean everybody makes the same amount of money? Or does fairness mean everybody gets the opportunity to make the same amount of money? I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.
The only way to get people out of poverty is J-O-B-S. Create jobs. To create wealth, not to subsidize wealth. When you subsidize people, you create the dependency. You rob them of dignity. The primary purpose of government is to keep the peace, protect the citizens, provide opportunity. And when we start getting into all kinds of other things, I think we invite greater control. And I’m fundamentally about freedom. You know the first freedom in America is actually the freedom of religion. It’s not the second, third, fourth or fifth.

The Bible does not support freedom of religion; there is one way and one way only to God, and that is belief and obedience to the laws it lays down. The pope also does not support freedom of religion for the same reason. And most people who depend on religion for a purpose and guidebook to follow in life and on a religious organization for emotional, financial, and social support will not change their minds and reject the teachings of their tribe when confronted by irrefutable evidence.

Refuting their religious/political dogma is considered a personal threat, an attack on everything they believe in, most especially to the concept of obedience to authority. It’s not necessarily that the Republicans would love to see small children working at looms again; Republicans want everyone to obey their authority and and their authority tells them to remove any regulation on authority. The reality of exploitation, disease and hunger are easily dismissed because obedience, not goodness, is the goal.

And if children are exploited, well, humans are sinners, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except insist on obedience to authority even more stridently.

Those who are forced to obey will try to force others to obey. Many will derive a great deal of comfort in having a defined place, purpose and group and react violently towards anyone who wants to take that away from them. They would rather live a lie than live with uncertainty, fear and doubt. But lies must be all-encompassing to work; the doubt that always lives deep under the surface of a lie must be kept out at all costs--costs paid by others, of course.

Conservatives will not admit that they scapegoat African-Americans, blaming them for the problems created or perpetuated by their leaders. They will say they are good people; they obey God, unlike certain other people who just happen to have inferior genes. Conservatism is inherently racist because conservative leaders need an enemy to deflect blame for their actions and a hierarchy of power that preserves their personal privilege. Authoritarian religious organizations are inherently anti-women for the same reason. Authoritarianism is the process by which the powerful exploit the powerless, whether in a family, church, society, or government. To destroy racism, sexism, and capitalistic exploitation, you have to destroy authoritarianism.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

It's good to see people discussing the rank, rotting racism at the heart of National Review's loathsome John Derbyshire. His post at Taki explaining to his children how they should protect themselves from all those stupid, violent black people finally tipped the scales, and Derbyshire at last stepped out of his tribe's boundaries.

The New York Daily News seems to think he was joking; of course he was not, as he regularly spouts racist screeds like the one he wrote for Taki. Dave Weigel blamed those who fight racism for racism, for if they would just shut up all this racism nonsense would simply go away.

If a simmering racial controversy simmers long enough, the likelihood of someone using it to justify racism rises dramatically. We're a month into the Trayvon Martin story, which makes it time for John Derbyshire to weigh in with a column about the frightening qualities of black people in groups.

...

There's a sort of micro-movement building to shame National Review into firing Derbyshire. Why would they? Derbyshire is saying something that many people believe but few people with word-slinging abilities know how to say: There are differences between the races, and whites should watch out for blacks. One popular Internet hobby of the moment is grabbing dumb blog comments or tweets and assembling them like a Pinterest page, to show what racists think. Derbyshire isn't stupid and he isn't being caught out. If someone wants to publish this, someone should.

All that said, I don't think I've taken much of this column's advice.

His post was so half-hearted that criticism forced him to follow up with another post downplaying Derbyshire's actions.

There's been some tsuris about my Friday post on John Derbyshire's Taki magazine essay "The Talk: Nonblack version." It was written in a pretty dry way, so I never ended up saying the obvious: People, the essay was disgusting.

...

the new Taki essay doesn't have any new science or research in it. It's an argument to warn nonblacks that black people are threatening. How much to fret about this? Well, the publication matters here. Derbyshire published in Taki magazine, which is the latest iteration of a rich man's controversialist web site. He's not talking this up on a cable news network. He doesn't have the cover of Time magazine. This isn't like the (successful) campaign to boot Pat Buchanan from MSNBC. It's a public shaming of a stupid article on a fringe site. And if you're going to have anti-black sentiment, would you rather have it dumb and exposed or would you rather have it subtle? The authors of stories about how Trayvon Martin looked really scary in his fake grill and tweets don't add oh, and this is because black youths are scary. Even if they're unarmed. Derbyshire came out and did it.

He might have done permanent damage to the whole "human biodiversity" project. It usually thrives on criticism. Those "shrieks of horror" are the whimpers of people who hate science and ignore reality. Not this time. The alleged value of Derbyshire-style analysis of race is that it's honest about human differences. You're explaining the thin-slice bias of the basketball coach who'd rather put a tall black kid on his team than a shorter white kid, something like that. But in this essay, Derbyshire tried to validate the fear of the nonblack person who -- oh, totally random example -- might decide that a tall black kid in a hoodie is a threat to his gated community. It's useful to have that out in the open.

If only Slate would fire Weigel.

Matt K. Lewis at The Daily Calleris upset that Derbyshire makes conservatives look racist; no doubt Derbyshire immediately and retroactively will no longer be considered a conservative.

Derbyshire’s screed (which was actually written at Taki’s Magazine) is, of course, incredibly harmful to conservatism because it reinforces a bogus stereotype that conservatives are inherently racist.

In one fell swoop (actually, Derbyshire has a history of flirting with this sort of thing, but it has finally caught up with him), he has done more harm to the conservative cause than any liberal ever could.

Too often, conservatives reflexively defend anyone attacked by the left, presumably based on the logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I’m happy to see his colleagues are instead standing on principle.

I believe in free speech — especially unpopular speech. But that doesn’t mean National Review has to subsidize it. And it certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t condemn it.

Some people aren’t worth the fighting for. Some things are indefensible. This is one of those cases.

Nobody believes conservatives are inherently racist; babies and small children are not racist and either are fascinated by the differences of others or barely notice them. They become racist because they are brainwashed by their parents or choose to take out their frustrations in life by blaming others.

The rest of the morally imbalanced crew at NR have plenty of racism of their own but of a much less showy sort, and they are canny enough to know when they are at risk. Rich Lowry has already denounced Derbyshire; we have to give him credit for having the sense to realize that for once Derbyshire will not go unnoticed.

Tod Kelly at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen is also concerned about the reputation of conservatism, so wrongly pegged by those liberals as racist.

It seems so clear to me that if the right as a whole is going to shed the reputation it absolutely has (and by and large does not deserve) on these fronts, it needs to be willing to stand up and be counted when lines are crossed, or at the very least to not defend them.

It is now inherent in conservatism to impede progress, and for conservatives, improving the lives of others is considered progress. Authoritarians must have an Other; the define themselves by who they are not. And they must have an enemy, the better to experience the cohesiveness and sense of belonging that comes from being part of a group. Hatred of the other is endemic in authoritarianism. People hate those whom they fear, and they fear those whom they have wronged. John Derbyshire is far from alone, and his conservative brethren are just as guilt as he, if not as brazen.

ADDED: Rich Lowry regrets to announce that John Derbyshire is no longer welcome at National Review.

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Shorter Ross Douthat: By letting billionaires flood the primaries with money, we have reduced the effect of money in politics and strengthened the democratic process.

Now that I have read Douthat's Privilege: Four Years At Harvard, Most Of Them A Virgin (review pending!) it is clear that getting into a prep school is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Little Ross's school brainwashed him into believing that he was one of the best and brightest and that it was only a matter of time before he took his rightful place as a world leader. When his manifest destiny declined to manifest, he did not reassess his expectations, examine his talents, needs and wants, and adjust his life plan accordingly. He kept reaching for that transcendent moment in which greatness would finally be his.

Douthat parlayed his prep school education into admittance to Harvard, even though he didn't know why he wanted to go there beside career advancement, didn't want to go to a school without a core curriculum, and often skipped classes. He kept falling for girls who already had boyfriends, living proof that they were considered desirable by his peers, and became serially disappointed when he could not find a soul mate, a perfect woman whose transcendent love would transform them into heroic figures. He half-envied, half despised the liberal student activists, who became minor campus heroes for raising wages for Harvard employees, but could not join them because they were all just dirty hippies and he had long ago rejected the mess and chaos of liberalism for the rigidness and conformity of conservatism. No heroism for Ross.

And when 9/11 happened, he freely admitted that here was another chance at heroic transcendence that he just let pass on by. He was not about to let anything interfere with his career in conservative politics. Douthat was born an upper-class white male on the East Coast and he knew in his bones that all he had to do was show up and he would be given everything that he felt was his due. But he wasn't promised comfort and ease and a pleasant life, he was promised greatness. And if Harvard couldn't transcend him into greatness, perhaps God can. All Douthat has to do is demand that everyone follow God's Word, be God's little hall monitor, and Douthat's holiness and sanctity will shine out for all to see. He will have transcended his body, which betrayed him by being ordinary and average instead of being like all the richer, better looking, better connected, smarter, more athletic, and more successful prep school stars that he envied from afar.

So no, Douthat sees nothing at all wrong with billionaires distorting the electoral process.

[C]onsider what would have happened without the rich cranks. Mitt Romney, who attracted far more big-money support overall than any of his rivals, would have probably followed up his near-win in Iowa and his victory in New Hampshire with an easy win in South Carolina, and the primary campaign would have been, to all intents and purposes, finished after that. Instead of having the Republican nomination decided by millions of voters nationwide, it would have been decided by the voters in just three states – and, of course, by Romney’s sturdy donor base.

An extended primary season, which has featured competitive races in dozens of states instead of just a few, hasn’t necessarily been good for the Republican Party’s general election prospects. But it has produced a far more small-d democratic outcome than the alternative universe where Adelson and Friess stayed on the sidelines and Romney wrapped things up early. Because of their donations, the frontrunner has had to confront actual voters day after day and week after week, in Wisconsin and Nevada and Alabama and everywhere in between. The results haven’t necessarily been pretty, but they’ve supplied a campaign — as the historian Gil Troy suggested last fall — whose “length and fury are proportional to the electorate’s size and the presidency’s importance.” If this is a subversion of the democratic process, it’s taking a pretty unusual form.

Democracy means that every billionaire has the right to shape elections, instead of just a few billionaires. Who says that the Republicans are trying to squash voter's rights? They're going out of their way to be inclusive!

Some members of our ruling class creates chaos and death just to show how heroic they are as they overcome all the obstacles they create for other people, knowing that their wealth and privilege insulates them from actually suffering any negative consequences. It's hard to be a war president without a war, or a saint without sinners. Fortunately, creating enemies out of nowhere can easily be arranged.